To borrow a phrase, SWEET SHIVERING SHIVA!

This CANNOT be happening. I've met idiots, then, apparently, there are idiots. And I work for/with one of the latter category. (Lady-In-Waiting from previous posts for the curious-minded.)

The week before I left for Chicago, I spent a goodly amount of time working on event planning for a smallish conference held last Tuesday and Wednesday. (You know, the small things--location, speakers, travel, etc.--the small things that LIW didn't get around to before she left for a WEEK) Because of the logical way that our blessed agency works, a large portion of that goodly amount of time was spent working on travel claims for the participants.

Let me walk the uninitiated through the process of filing a travel claim:
1. Fill out the claim to the best of your logical ability.
2. Realize that logic has NOTHING what-so-ever to do with it, and rework the claim.
3. Take the claims to the other scullery maid in the office, who is reluctantly in charge of travel, so to obtain her signature.
4. Return to your desk and make changes. Return to Scullery #2.
5. Take the initialed claim to the Queen Bee to initial.
6. Return to your desk and make changes. Return to Queen Bee.
7. Take the doubly-initialed claim to the Guru de Travel to check over (and initial).
8. Return to your desk and make changes. Return to G de T.
9. Receive accepted and initialed travel claims to be signed by the participants of the conference.
10. Return completed forms to G de T to file for payment.

So I spend all day Thursday and Friday doing the claims, moving the conference do to another monumental fsck up (though not the agency's fault), and then redoing the claims. When I leave for Chi-town, they are initialed in triplicate, received and ready to be approved by Herself. Enter LIW.

I put a sticky note on each claim with a list of information I needed to complete each one, since there are significant differences between all 24 of them. LIW takes the claims to the conference to be finally signed, but decides that I don't really need all the information I have requested and tells people to disregard most of the information on the note. THEN she decides that much of the information on the claims is incorrect, and takes it upon herself to not put questions on sticky notes to ask me later, but instead to white out all the information I had painstakingly researched and placed into the form, and put in INCORRECT INFORMATION, that now I have to find some way to fix. Well, auditors frown on white-out on forms that determine lump sums of money, so somehow I have to recreate the signatures of all these people onto forms that had she not screwed with in the first place would already be paid.

These are the forms that, in an ideal world, I would place in her desk chair with a file folder and a note, "You fscked 'em up, you fix 'em." Damn my ethics.